Posted
by
Soulskill
on Friday December 03, 2010 @03:55PM
from the fully-functional dept.

Csiko writes "Researchers at Boston University's department of cognitive and neural systems are working on an artificial brain implemented with memristors. 'A memristor is a two-terminal device whose resistance changes depending on the amount, direction, and duration of voltage that's applied to it. But here's the really interesting thing about a memristor: Whatever its past state, or resistance, it freezes that state until another voltage is applied to change it. Maintaining that state requires no power.' Also theoretically described, solid state versions of memristors have not been implemented until recently. Now researchers in Boston claim that memristors are the new key technology to implement highly integrated, powerful artificial brains on cheap and widely available hardware within five years."

If I copy your brain to another cloned brain, yank yours out, and replace it with the clone, everyone else will interact with you as if you were you, no difference; but YOU would vanish into the blackness, you'd stop living, you'd die.

Which is the exact reason I'd never take a ride on a Star Trek teleporter. I don't want to die and leave my entire physical, mental, and emotional estate to my identical twin who hasn't been born yet.